Mother is a Question

If you listen all the way to our episodes' end credits (which we hope you do), you know the only way we've been able to make this show is because of something called the Big Questions Project. Well, three other fantastic podcasts came out of the Big Questions Project and in the next few months we’ll be featuring them here on our feed. First up, it’s a show called Rock that Doesn’t Roll. It’s the s...

This week we're sharing the loving and playful podcast, "How to Survive the End of the World" hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown. In this episode, "Loving as Family Practice," the Brown sisters explore what they’ve learned about love at the site of their own family, what they are generating as adults building and holding family, mothering children, and some things they have figured ou...

To wrap up Season 2 we have a love story about a grandmother and her granddaughter -  how they came to know themselves through each other, and how they’ve saved each other’s lives, again and again.  It’s a story about home. How we find our place.  Our longing for Motherland.   It’s about destiny– the kind we create and the kind that creates us .  And as we prepare to end our season, it’s also a st...

This episode, we’re traveling to a place and time when mama was the muse–back when musicians in the U.S. were constantly singing about “the one who’s always true,” as one of these songs goes. One hundred years ago in the U.S., in the early days of recorded music, a lot of the songs people were listening to were about one particular person: mother.  Thanks to Sarah Bryan, the Association for Cultur...

Comedian and mother, Negin Farsad, got a strange assignment - one that sent her on an unexpected trip– a trippy trip– a hero’s quest– into the depths of her unconscious mind... where it turned out, all the monsters of motherhood were there waiting for her. Four years out from giving birth, Negin hadn’t thought she was avoiding a whole lot.  In fact as a comedian, she considered it her job to revea...

Elizabeth Rush has spent her career writing about climate change--her book Rising was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Before Liz made her decision of whether to become a mother, she felt like she needed to go to the end of the world–Antarctica–and stand face to face with a melting glacier.  In 2019, Liz jumped on a research vessel bound for Thwaites Glacier, with a deep longing to become a...

What if humans could evolve into our most nurturing and creative selves?  What if society were organized around care instead of extraction and destruction?  What if we followed the leadership of those who mother?  Well, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, self-proclaimed Black Feminist Love Evangelist, thinks we have to.  It's urgent .  And she calls this possibility Motherful.   This episode, Alexis Pauline Gu...

Katherine is a farmer.  She always thought of herself as in control, someone who could plan for any situation.  But when her son died after birth, that old her died too.  "The world" she says, "is out of control, and any type of control that I experience is a figment of my imagination."   But the river keeps flowing, the birds keep singing, and the garlic still needs to be harvested. How can it al...

We pick up with the story of Anne, a day after she told her kids that she was so unhappy, so lost that to figure things out, she had to get on a plane and put five thousand miles between herself and her life. Mother is a Question is created by Natasha Haverty and Julia Metzger-Traber. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal. Original Music by Raky Sastri and Julia Read Manager of The Big Questions Project: Co...

We open our season with a story that came to us through a listener. “Can you imagine leaving your child?” Anne asks, “No, of course not. Because none of us do. Nor did I, until four days before I did it.” Here’s Part 1 of her story. Mother is a Question is created by Natasha Haverty and Julia Metzger-Traber. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal. Executive Producer: Genevieve Sponsler Manager of The Big Que...

Being a mother is a portal into the core of human existence. Join us as we hold a microphone up to that portal and listen for the unanswerable, the unspeakable, the mysterious, the awe-some and the kaleidoscopically different realities of mothers.

Yeye just crossed the threshold into motherhood. And she thinks what she learned during her crossing—when she gave birth—might be the key into the kind of motherhood in which she could be her truest, fullest self. But she’s also still asking questions. “Can you explain to me how we ended up in that situation? Wait, can you say that again? Was it really necessary, or am I another Latina statistic t...

As the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter, Nicole always knew her life didn’t begin and end with her. But when she became a mother, she gained new awareness of how mothering reaches not only into the past—but also into the future. Join us as Julia speaks with artists Nicole and Richael about how being connected to “deep time” shapes how they mother.

Rita was the mom next door—she moved in when Julia was two years old, but there was so much in the songs and the whispers that Julia didn’t know and couldn’t understand.  What was Rita carrying alone all these years?  How did she make it through?  Join us as we make space for the darkness, listen for the wisdom and witness the hidden journey of the mother next door.

Rae is trying to decide whether to become a mother. And Rae is coming at this decision in a pretty unique way—because Rae really feels like there must be a right answer to this question. Join us as Rae tries to figure out how to know whether to step into the ultimate unknown.

When Julia found out she was pregnant, she was bombarded with voices in her head around what a mother was supposed to be. In this episode, Julia turns to Laurel, who is on her own inspiring journey of reckoning with those voices and creating the motherhood that is true to her. Laurel never wanted to be a parent growing up because she couldn’t imagine herself fitting into the narrow frame of hetero...

Our journey into this territory of mothering begins. Tasha searches out someone whose deep wisdom about mothering was totally lost on her when they first met ten years ago. Back then, Teourialier Johnson—who Tasha met as “T”—was a teacher of motherhood in an unlikely context. Now, for us, she’s a teacher of so much more, opening to transformation even when it seems all has been lost. Join us as “T...

Join best friends Julia Metzger-Traber and Tasha Haverty as they listen for the unspeakable and crack open the definitions of motherhood alongside mothers from all walks of life.  Through warm, playful, and surprising interviews, this is an invitation into the depths of mothers’ hearts, minds and stories. Each episode is a portal into the kaleidoscopically different and yet universal experiences o...

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